The First American Legion and the Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916

2019 is the Centennial of the American Legion. But did you know that there was another organization that claimed that name first? Not only that, but one of the founders of that earlier group was a Roosevelt too. Only this time, it was Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States of America.

That first organization was founded in the wake of the beginnings of the First World War. In August of 1914, Germany began a conflict which would soon entangle most of Europe and eventually the entire globe either directly or indirectly. This savage war was a conflict that would see the evolution of the warfare in ways no one had even dreamed possible on the day it began.

The old ways of fighting land wars involved large armies massing across from each other and having decisive battles filled with strategic movements and flanking maneuvers. The war that…